unless CPU does other stuff while DMA completes, it's way more overhead to set up DMA than to do same stuff in software. Even when both in the end reach same transfer rate. And nowadays DMA often is a relic like A20 gate, with CPU copying 10 words in the time where DMA moves one byte

Action: DocScrutinizer05 wonders if they really got a proper mass spectrometer in that SCiO thing. If they do (I seen an early prototype of a sugar cube sized mass spectro several years ago at embedded fair in Nuernberg) then this could become a damn lot more than just "tell apat apples from banana" - it would be Abby's wet dream: Major Mass-Spectrometer in your pocket

the sugar-cube-mass-spectro was a damn smart ting: thanks to micro size they didn't need to evacuate the "chamber" where molecules get "sorted" in an electric field. And also thanks to the tiny size of the thing, really low voltages were sufficient to create the field to accelerate and deviate the molecules

I talked with the guy and asked him "but how do you evacuate the thing?". He answered "we don't need to, the gap is so small only a few molecules come in anyway, no matter if it's air or the test substance"

I asked him "but you need high voltages to accelerate and do the deviating field, no?" he answered: " look at this tiny cube. Now figure we have hundreds of electrodes in there, each powered from normal 5V digital logic. We create fields of kV to MV per meter, thanks to the tiny structures"